A Tale of Two Grids - "This computing model is useful if
you are trying to analyze a bunch radio signals for intelligent life or
render the next Pixar film, but for the 99% of us who just want have a
simple piece of business logic available on the net somewhere,
accessible to the rest of our services, its 100% useless."

The SOA With Reach: Web-Oriented Architecture - "WOA is more of an emerging best practice from the battle-hardened folks
building software on the Web than it is from ivory tower architects or
the analyst group notebook."

The Long Tail is Chunky - "As you go down the long tail, you may lose sheer numbers of potential customers, but you will have an easier time actually reaching those customers."

Rolling With Ruby on Rails - Part 1, Part 2, and a followup, Ajax on Rails - "Maybe you've heard about Ruby on Rails, the super productive new way to develop web applications, and you'd like to give it a try, but you don't know anything about Ruby or Rails."

These are all what I call DRM -- discardable reading material. Nice, handy articles to print out and carry around with you to fill up those spare moments when you are waiting for something to happen.

Mike Arrington interviewed Amazon's Adam Selipsky (VP of Web Services) and Dave Barth (Product Manager) about Amazon S3 on the TalkCrunch podcast. The interview is currently represented in the site's RSS feed, but it is not visible on the site itself.

While this is not directly related to AWS, it is a perfect example of how open standards (e.g. XML and HTTP), common formats (e.g. RSS), generous licensing, and direct person to person collaboration can take an idea from concept to production in a matter of weeks.

Through an odd twist of fate, the two Amazonians involved (Dewitt Clinton and Jeff Barr) were once colleagues on the same team at Microsoft. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

Robert Scoble of Microsoft's Channel 9 recently paid a visit to Amazon's Seattle office to interview Jeff Barr and Steve Rabuchin of Amazon's Developer Relations team. In this 19 minute video, you can see how developers are using Amazon's Web Services in a variety of ways. You can also learn about the joint Amazon/Microsoft Developer Contest, which features $5,000 in prizes.

In today’s post I thought I would talk about the internet, where we think we are going, and how Amazon web services fit in. As ever (with these thoughts), feel free to link to them in your own blogs.

The internet is a kaleidoscope of ideas, it was designed to be always available and through HTTP (the World Wide Web) it is easy to use. These are very powerful features that combine to create a rich environment that can change and even reinvent itself at the speed of thought.

This is what is happening now, after many years of growth HTTP seemed to have met its zenith as the protocol that allowed the distribution of web pages (showing its ability to scale and ease of use). Not anymore now that same ease of use is allowing HTTP to take the internet into its next evolution, which many people are calling "web 2.0."

HTTP is a simple to understand protocol consisting of a few verbs and a stunning range of nouns (URI’s, the official term for the URL’s or web site names you use).

We use HTTP all the time and it’s become such a part of our lives that we rarely think about it or show surprise when our 6 year old kid knows how to get to the Disney website.

But this simplicity belies a great power: every time you type a URL into your browser you are receiving information back from a machine, along with some indication as to the state of the resource at the end of the URL on that distant machine. For example, every time you type www.amazon.com you receive the latest page from Amazon.com. The page you receive is a representation of the state of that distant server and its appearance in your browser means that state has been transferred to you.

In essence, this is the native programming model of the web, and it works, its scalable and so easy to use, it holds few fears and this is all that REST is. REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer and it’s a programming model that uses the verbs of HTTP along with the nouns (the URI’s) to gain information on the state of a service on a distant machine, but its simple basically if you can type a URL you can use REST.